An old friend of Garibaldi's arrives and tries to take part in a dangerous
alien combat sport.
A rabbi helps Ivanova come to terms with her father's death.
Theodore Bikel as Rabbi Koslov.
Greg McKinney as Walker Smith.
Soon-Tek Oh as The Muta-Do.
Don Stroud as Caliban.

Sub-genre: Drama
P5 rating: 6.41
Production number: 119
Original air date: May 25, 1994
DVD release date: November 5, 2002
Written by Larry DiTillio
Directed by John Flynn

The fact that aliens of several races -- including a Centauri -- all seemed
to agree that humans had no business fighting in the Mutai seems to indicate
that there is a lot of resentment toward humans among the other races, enough
that they see the distinction between humans and themselves as much greater
than the distinctions between each other.

At one point, there was a discussion in the scene about the whole
gills/scales/fins issue, to define kosher...but it *really* brought the
scene to a screaming standstill, and we needed to concentrate on the
relationships at that moment. In addition, as we looked at it, you would
have to get into the question of how alien gills/scales/fins compare to
earthly gills/scales/fins, because they're going to be very different in
many ways. In short order it became a massive Talmudic discussion, and
we only have an hour for the show....

Babylon 5 (the show) got not a dime for sticking in the
Zima
sign. We just thought...well, it'd be funny.

Yes, slappers = skin tabs, for introducing medication. The ones in
TKO had been stolen from B5 medsupplies.

Through a miscommunication, Warners thought TKO was in the slot in which
we'd placed Quality [of Mercy], so that went out to TV Guide, and it's now
too late to change the order back. Doesn't matter; neither are really
arc-stories, though it was hoped to hold back some of Susan's development in
TKO just a tad longer.

It was Larry's idea to name the character Walker Smith, after Sugar
Ray Robinson.

If the deceased has been dead for quite a while, the period during
which one must sit shiva is greatly reduced to a day or so, I'm told.

Larry wrote the shiva stuff all on his lonesome. As for being an
abbreviated version...apparently shiva lasts 3 days for someone
recently deceased. If it's been months since the death, the service
is usually much shorter, and again, there was only Ivanova and Koslov
who actually were part of or knew the deceased.

I'm told that shiva need not last 7 full days, if the death was not
recent, and if the body has already been buried.

Now, on the samovar issue...whatever your background, if your family
grew up in Russia and has been there for several hundred years or
more -- and the Ivanov family has been there since at LEAST the 1800s
-- you do become part of the culture. That, as I always understood
it, was part of the reason for making sure children learned hebrew,
yiddish *and* the dominant language of the culture, to give their
kids a fighting chance in a difficult world. It's not so much a case
of the culture assimiliating the individual (though certainly that
happens as well), but the individual INCORPORATING the culture.

Ivanova is jewish. Ivanova is russian. Of the two, she tends to see
herself as a russian first. There's no value statement there, that's
just the way she is. Her parents were both russian, going back many
generations on both sides. Some in her family tree were jewish, and
some were not; there was some intermarrying. That may be part of why
she sees herself as more russian than jewish, but it may be just a
quirk.

(And to the protest of, "Well, you created her," yes, I did. But
there comes a time, if you've done your job right as a writer, when
the character more or less takes over, and starts telling YOU who and
what he or she is. There are times I mentally turn to Ivanova and
say, "Okay, what do *you* think?" And she talks to me in my head, as
do all of my characters. It's part of making your characters real.)

When she went off to boarding school overseas -- part of an ongoing
international system put into place by EarthGov to help its various
member nations get along with one another -- she identified most
strongly with that russian aspect in relation to those around her.
She learned to speak English without a perceptible accent.

The samovar is a valued and valuable part of russian life. It is the
family hearth, on one level, a possession passed on from generation to
generation. Knowing that Ivanova was not terribly religious herself,
he would generally not leave her any of his personal religious
artifacts, but would dnate them to the local synagogue, while some,
like a menorah, might go to other relatives. People who could
appreciate them and use them. The samovar is a very personal object;
to the correspondent with a fiance who is russian...*I* am byeloruss,
white-russian, one-and-a-half generation American born. And I can
tell you that the biggest fights I've ever seen over bequeaths were
over a) money, and b) the samovar.

The problem with this discussion is that it has very little to do
with who Susan Ivanova *is*, and more to do with the politics of what
a russian or a jew or a russian jew *should be*. She is what she is,
like it or not.

"The remark: '...pouting in that way that only 13 can...'"

. . . the comment is essentially correct; ain't nobody
can pout like a 13 year old.

To the problems some have with Theodore Bikell's accent not sounding
real...it's my understanding that he was raised in Russia.

Ivanova does not have an accent because she was educated overseas,
her father wanting her to have certain advantages the rest of her
family did not.

Nowhere did we say that Andrei or the rest of the Ivanov family ever
emigrated. They didn't. They live in Russia. Or lived, in any
event. Not everyone migrates to the US or to Israel, and not everyone
wants to.

On the treel/kosher discussion...I can only shrug. Nobody's ever
shown that jews go forward into the future, placed them at the heart
of a science fiction show as a regular character, nobody's shown shiva
before in (and possibly out of) an SF series...and some folks are
complaining that not every aspect of a treel's kosher-ness was
discussed at dinnertime.

Some days, you just can't win....

Feh.

What was that Harlan Ellison book Ivanova was reading?
The book is Harlan's autobiography, which he plans to write around
the year 2000, and yes, that's his photo. (He borrowed the prop when we
were finished and casually carried it with him to a few places, just to
make people nuts thinking there was a book out they'd missed....)

[Posted 28 May 1994] BTW, there's an interesting couple of articles
about this episode in this week's Jewish Journal, for another
perspective on the show.

Channel 4 in the UK didn't show "TKO" during the initial run
TKO's main importance is to the Ivanova arc, as she finally comes to
terms with her father's death. Do I have an opinion on C4's decision
not to show TKO?

Absolutely.

If the problem is showing bare-kunckle fighting to the death, then
somebody should point out to C4 that *nobody dies* in the match.

The Mutari are those who fight in the Mutai; and you *did* see Narns
and Centauri and others hanging around the ring. The only ones you
won't see there are Minbari. It ain't their thing.

As I've noted before, over the long haul, as you watch episodes, you
will see things you didn't see before. Sometimes they're clues, and
sometimes they're comments which now read a different way than they
did the first time you saw them. There's been a number of the latter
very subtly sprinkled through the episodes aired so far...lines that
everyone jumped on as meaning one thing, but which will mean something
else, and lines which nobody thought much of the first time out...but
which will elicit a wince of irony later on.

There's a corker in "TKO," but at the moment, it's absolutely
invisible. It's not a clue, it's not necessary for the story, it's
just one of those things that, after you've seen all the rest of this
season's episodes, you will go "Ouch," when you see it next.

Actually, the idea of Zima lasting even into 1995 is hysterical. I
keep fighting the urge to have some guy show up on B5, "Zo then I
zays to him, nize ztation"...and five Narns just jump on him and beat
the shit out of him, WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM!

We've killed off all of Ivanova's close family, yes. Maybe some
cousins are left, but that's about it.

There's a Billy Joel song, where one particular lyric (and I'm quoting
from memory) says, "You still have a pain inside you / That you carry
with a certain pride / It's the only part / Of a broken heart / You
could ever save." That's Ivanova.

She's had her heart stomped on a lot. And she's been holding it in.
Even with her father's death, she sucked in the pain, fought back the
tears. There is one episode, which will be right at the end of the
year, where she finds she can't run from her pain anymore...can't run
from the tears...and deals with them in a scene that's very moving
and absolutely brings tears to the eyes.